IN THE NATION

IN THE NATION; Going Easy on Energy

BY Tom Wicker

Published: January 5, 1991

The likelihood of war and the fact of recession, both heavily tainted with Mideast oil, demonstrate the need for President Bush to lead the country toward energy independence.

Right? Not as the White House sees it.

John Sununu & Co. have struck again, defanging a strong energy conservation program proposed at cabinet level, after 18 months of study. When this offensive document reached the Bush White House -- abandon hope, all ye who enter here in search of the vision thing -- it was stripped of any idea that might have offended anybody this side of the Sierra Club.

Gone are higher mileage requirements for gas-guzzling autos. Gone, too, are Federal regulations to impose energy conservation, any suggestion of government intervention in the sacrosanct private sector, all impolitic urgings toward consumer sacrifice. Gone, for sure, are any energy-related tax increases.

Gone but not forgotten, at least not by the "knowledgeable" and possibly outraged officials who told James Risen of The Los Angeles Times the grim story. They said that Mr. Sununu, the White House chief of everything; Richard Darman, the Ayatollah of the Budget Office, and Michael Boskin, Supreme Commander of the Council of Economic Advisers, had gutted what Mr. Risen termed "the most ambitious" of the proposed energy conservation provisions.

Why -- especially when Secretary of State James Baker's most recent threat of "devastation" to Iraq leaves little doubt that the Bush Administration is prepared to go to war, not least to maintain American access to Middle East oil?

Why, more especially, when in the United States the economy has drifted downward into recession, a process accelerated and made worse by the third oil price "shock" in 20 years?

Why, when even before these immediate reasons for seeking greater energy independence, powerful calls existed for strong measures to insure energy conservation?

Though the number of automobiles operating in the world is inevitably increasing, for instance, greater fuel efficiency could save 2.9 million barrels of oil per day by the year 2000. That's about what the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates will be needed by then to double agricultural production in the developing countries.

That can't be achieved, nor will the trade deficit be much improved, unless the U.S., with its staggering auto population and oil consumption, learns to conserve energy. Instead of mandating or encouraging conservation, however, the Bush energy program apparently will propose incentives for new oil production in the United States and elsewhere, outside the Mideast.

One reason for this myopic approach to energy policy is that Messrs. Sununu, Darman and Boskin have demonstrated before their bureaucratic mastery of the feckless lower levels of this Administration. Another is that the Energy Department's draft is described as more of a laundry list of options than a specified program for which its authors would be prepared to fight to the death. This made the draft easier to dismember.

More important, the top-level decisions diluting the proposals exemplify the Administration's free-market philosophy and nicely fit Mr. Bush's pro-business views, shaped by his experience in the oil industry. Such considerations prevail in this White House, even when a tough energy program is a national necessity and would tend to validate an ill-understood war.

It's hard to remember now, after 10 years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, that back in the dim mists of the 70's President Carter produced an energy program the size of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. It featured all sorts of inducements to conservation and incentives to alternative and renewable energy sources, many of which became law -- just in time, for the most part, to be killed off by Mr. Reagan.

Now George Bush, given another opportunity to use Middle East events to lead Americans toward energy independence, as Mr. Carter tried to use the two previous oil shocks, chooses instead to lead the world into a war the overall outcome of which -- including its effect on oil supplies but not the certainty of many American casualties -- no one can predict.

Another unnamed official, illogically terming the White House energy approach "pragmatic," told James Risen that "for the long term, free-market measures work best." The long term? With a war scheduled in two weeks for which little enthusiasm is visible anywhere, with a recession here and now and getting worse, what would be wrong with thinking about the short term? If not now, when?